Wednesday, March 19, 2008

'To Train School Children in ... Loyalty to the State' (Vin Suprynowicz)

Don't you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they're really up to?

For years, I've called for the complete shutdown of America's massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I must be "against education," which is sort of like charging those who opposed slave galleys with being against ocean navigation.

Read de Tocqueville for his amazement at the high level of literacy – including an ability to discuss complex political issues – found among American workingmen of the 1830s – 20 years before Dewey and Mann launched today's government-run youth camps on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in 1852.

The New York Times reported Feb. 27 that fewer than half of American teenagers know when the Civil War was fought, and one in four believe Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750. About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany's chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him in a multiple-choice test as a munitions maker or premier of Austria.

Why is anyone surprised? The academic curriculum is the "cover," the "front." The real goal is not to ensure education, but rather to ensure against successive generations developing a cohesive philosophy of self-sufficiency, a code of ethics appropriate to a free people living under a government of limited powers. The goal is to make sure successive generations are powerless to muster the historical and economic context, logic and critical thinking skills necessary to see through the latest scheme to seize yet more of our wealth and use the loot to hire more bureaucrats to regulate yet another portion of our lives, our industry, our commerce.

About Me

My wonderful wife Sarah and I homeschool our four kids and live in a suburb of the Twin Cities. I'm just trying to help spread the message of peace and personal liberty! I can be reached at chris_minnesota [at] yahoo [dot] com.